Video Interview: Robert Scoble of FastCompany.tv
by Howard Greenstein
Nick Douglas chats with Robert Scoble of FastCompany.tv
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Link: sevenload.com
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Nick Douglas chats with Robert Scoble of FastCompany.tv
.
Link: sevenload.com
They wear white suits and attend conferences. What’s up the TheNextWeb.org guys?
Link: sevenload.com
Nick Douglas interviews Joe Kraus from Google.
Link: sevenload.com
Nick Douglas interviewed Scottt Beale of Laughing Squid about participating in the social scene, online and off, plus the challenges of the Network Age.
Link: sevenload.com
We caught Forrester’s Charlene Li between plane flights and speaking engagements for just long enough to find out what’s on her mind. She and co-author Josh Bernoff are spending a lot of time responding to public interest about their new book, Groundswell, about how to leverage social media. Charlene will be on a panel Tuesday morning, June 17th at Supernova2008.
Charlene Li: I’ve been looking at the future of social networks — how they will develop over the next 5-10 years. My thesis is that social networks will be like air, in that they will permeate everything that we do. This is posited on the idea that today’s existing, closed social networking sites and portals open up and make it easy for people to connect with their friends and the content created by their friends across different sites. For example, a friend’s book review written on Facebook should show up on Amazon when I’m thinking about buying that book.
Charlene Li: I’m impressed by companies like Twitter who make it really super easy to work with them, especially with their APIs. It means that their technology becomes a platform, not just a destination.
Charlene Li: There are so many start-ups that are focused primarily on the technology, not the problem that people and companies are facing. There are a lot of really tough problem out there, and nobody is really addressing them. For example, follow a busy mom around for a day and find all the friction points she faces — then figure out what tools and technologies could make it a lot better. My pet project — a workable kid/family calendar that can facilitate play date scheduling! It’s the bane of my evenings at home.
Charlene Li: My biggest challenge has been waiting patiently for the book to come out! Now it’s finally out and people are reading it. The best part is when someone comes up with a dog eared, heavily underlined book and shows me their favorite part. It’s extremely gratifying to know that the book is helping people understand this new space, and that it’s providing them with the frameworks and information that they need.
Charlene Li: I love new ideas and meeting people through whom I can see the world in a different way. Learning and thinking about new ideas is what gets me most excited.
Supernova’s theme for 2008 is “Challenges for the Network Age” - you can read more in this post by Kevin Werbach, Supernova’s founder.
One of my clients, Scott Draves (known as Spot), is an award-winning software artist, some of whose art is based on a complex network. I’ve interviewed him to learn more.
Isabel Walcott Hilborn: To create your art, you work with networks — made up of both people and computers. Can you explain how networks factor into your creative process?
Scott Draves: Right, much of my art harnesses a large collection of computers and people into a cyborg mind: “the Electric Sheep“. It’s a distributed screensaver that produces an abstract animation influenced by everyone who watches it. My intention is to produce artificial life in virtual reality.
So there’s the literal network of thousands of computers working together as a supercomputer to animate the “sheep”, a distributed render farm. These computers also form a p2p bittorrent network for sharing the final animation files.
The people behind the computers form another network — everyone who’s watching can vote on whether not they like what they see, and the more popular sheep reproduce with a genetic algorithm including cross-over and mutation. So the sheep evolve to satisfy their human audience.
There’s also “intelligent design” in the sense than people can use additional software to make their own sheep, and submit it to the gene pool. So there’s an artificial intelligence competing and collaborating with crowd-sourcing. What makes this design network go is Creative Commons licensing, which reduces the resistance in this circuit of mind, binding it together.
There’s another and much larger network: the software that implements this work is itself Open Source. The client and server are free software under the GPL, programmed by a globe-spanning team. They are made from components and tools developed by thousands of programmers over decades, based on science and mathematics published worldwide.
The Electric Sheep are standing on the shoulders of these giants, our technological and artistic fore-fathers. This is a network too, the web of ideas, in which every artist, and every person, is ultimately engaged.
Isabel Walcott Hilborn: How long did it take to build what you have? Can anyone make a network?
Scott Draves: The Electric Sheep started in 1999, but were based on a rendering algorithm that I developed in 1992. So the Electric Sheep have been growing for a very long time, but there are certainly networks that have gotten larger in less time, like say MySpace. So yes, anyone can start a network, but whether or not anyone will join is another question.
Isabel Walcott Hilborn: What are some of the key differences you see between working with a network and working independently?
Scott Draves: When working with a network you have given up a degree of control, so you have to very carefully consider everyone’s motivation. The network only exists by the will of the participants.
Some networks move at a glacial pace, which can be frustrating. For example, writing software portable and reliable enough to run on almost any Windows PC or Mac is hard enough. Doing so through a “committee” is glacial compared to solo hacking where I can try out ideas every minute, instead of monthly. I can only roll out a new client/server protocol once per year.
The reward, however, has no substitute.
Isabel Walcott Hilborn: What benefits have you gained from creating a network to make your art?
Scott Draves: In my case, the network is an essential.
Isabel Walcott Hilborn: What are the main challenges you see coming from your network?
Scott Draves: On the technical side, the biggest challenge has been finding the bandwidth to run the server. Ultimately broadcast should get built in to the infrastructure of the net (what if ISPs ran torrent seeders?).
The human side is more complicated. The GPL and CC have done a good job of handling the intellectual property issues so far. But we still face simple problems like vandalism, and what I call the “Las Vegas Effect”.
The screen-saver is based on the popular vote, and often the most popular sheep seem to appeal to the lowest common denominator: they have bright colors and fast motion. I call this the “Las Vegas Effect” and it’s something I struggle with. As “god” of the system I could obliterate any sheep that displeases me, but I almost never interfere so directly.
Instead I channel my personal aesthetic into the “Dreams in High Fidelity” which is the dual to the screen-saver: instead of low resolution for free, it’s High Definition for a price. These limited edition works contain only sheep actively selected by me, assembled according to my design, and re-rendered at vastly higher quality.
The two versions are symbionts: neither could survive without the other.
UPDATE:
As the Featured Artist for Supernova 2008, Scott Draves projected his limited edition fine art “Dreams in High Fidelity on two screens at the Technology Showcase and Gala. The projection of his work at this event was made possible by the Panasonic Projector Systems Company. The dual projections are also visible in many of the video interviews on the Sevenload site.
Here’s a snapshot of the projected work at the event, courtesy of Lisa Rein:
Dave McClure’s rant on Web 3.0 as Hailstorm 2.0 is a great read for anyone interested in the future of the Web. It ties together many topics we cover at Supernova, including social platforms, identity, and the evolving online business ecosystem, not to mention Microsoft-Yahoo, Google vs. Microsoft, online payment systems, advertising, and more. At the end, though, Dave makes a shockingly dull-sounding observation:
“Web 3.0″ is the condition which exists when someone is always “logged in” on the web, and can move from site to site without ever having to re-enter a username/password.
That’s it? No semantic web? No 3D avatars? No free doughnuts? It sounds so… boring. I mean, c’mon, single sign-on?
Sometimes, though, the most important changes are the ones that seem too small to mention. To a great extent, the explosion of activity, innovation, and monetization on the Web since 2002 happened because most of us are now on broadband connections. And what makes broadband so valuable in daily life isn’t the speed… it’s the fact that it’s always on. Even something as basic as a search engine query isn’t so convenient when you have to make a dial-up connection to your ISP every time you start a session.
Dial-up made using the Internet a conscious choice, an activity delimited in time and space. Broadband makes it something you assume is always there, whenever you need it. It may not seem like a big difference, but psychologically, it’s huge. It’s the same phenomenon as Josh Kopelman’s penny gap — a little bit of effort changes the dynamics of the market.
Site log-ins are similar. If you have to remember a username and password for all sites you visit, you’re constantly reminded that they are separate islands. Equally important, the lack of ubiquitous identity and sign-on infrastructures means that your usage data and other personal information doesn’t flow freely across those sites. We’ve overcome the limitations of the Web as a series of static “pages,” but not the limitations of the Web as a series of discrete “sites.”
If you’ll recall from my Ten Challenges post, one of the key questions for the Network Age is the interplay of aggregation and fragmentation. Networked businesses tend to have massive economies of scale, not just in their physical infrastructure, but in their information infrastructure. At the same time, there is increasing value in hyperspecialization. Either way, though, the overhead of log-ins makes a difference. The more hyper-focused niche players I want to interact with, the harder it is to manage passwords and go to the trouble of connecting and personalizing each service.
Now of course, this leaves some big questions un-answered. Like, Will There Only Be One? Or Two? We may want a ubiquitous identity infrastructure that removes the scourge of log-ins, but do we want that controlled by Microsoft, or Microsoft and Google? How do the significant players — including those two as well as Facebook, MySpace, AOL, Plaxo, LinkedIn, etc. — think differently about these questions? Or should we own our own identity though some user-centric ID model? Will change happen top-down, or bottom-up? And what about those pesky bugaboos of privacy and security?
I guess we have a lot to talk about this year at Supernova….
Just came across this interesting post by Max Freier looking at different patterns in linking behavior from users of top social sites. What does it mean that Jaiku is among the top 15 most linked-to sites by Twitter users? Just that they’re cross-posting on both and the links are automatic, or that they’re so addicted that they tweet in multiple places? Interested in your take.
In the one-girl’s-trash-is-another-girl’s-treasure category, Microsoft announced a deal to allow LinkedIn, Facebook and some other lesser-known social networks to scrape Hotmail address books to look for friends.
Some for-profit industry commentators went along with Microsoft’s PR hype, like OnlineMedia Daily. Others, like ZDNet’s Steve O’Hear, were more skeptical.
In other news, Google is bringing the issue of protecting human rights at the cost of the company’s market share to a shareholder vote - adequately reported by Joseph Hunkins at WebGuild. The two proposals up for a vote are that Google would strictly control censorship and data sharing to protect human rights, and that Google would establish a Human Rights Committee to monitor these issues. Google recommends no to both proposals, and they’ll be able to point to the fact that their shareholders voted these proposals down as an excuse for not doing them.
The approach is an attempt to justify Google’s capitulation to anti-democratic policy from countries like China - behavior that they’ve been called to task for engaging in because of their “do no evil” mantra. The sad thing, to me, is that giving a question like this to shareholders: “Should we do the right thing even though it means making less money?” is giving it to the wrong party to decide. Shareholders don’t say no to profits.
It’s the users who should be asked, and the users who can decide to abandon the Google ship if they see objectionable, hypocritical behavior. Insofar as a choice to deny human rights may alienate Google users, the stock prices could fall on a “no” vote — but most of the time issues like human rights in far-away countries can’t compete with great technology and brand. An effective boycott is unlikely, a yes vote is unlikely. Perhaps “do no evil” and “make money in China” are fundamentally incompatible. Perhaps a mantra change to “do no evil except in countries led by repressive dictators” is in order?
An article in today’s New York Times ends by saying that 85% of California adults think sites should not track around-the-web behavior for the purpose of ad targeting. The rest of the article describes how many of the major commercial web companies do just that.
There’s a comScore graphic that shows how many times a month companies collect user data: Yahoo collects twice as often as Fox, which collects twice as often as AOL. Google (not including DoubleClick) comes up 4th.
This data, however, doesn’t include information entered on MySpace’s social network pages, and the article doesn’t cover Facebook. Even if web companies aren’t putting two and two together yet, they will be soon.
If we’re not already, we’ll be seeing ads that come to us thanks to a delectable combination of which causes we join on Facebook, which people we befriend on MySpace, which keywords we use on search sites, and what products we buy online… combined of course with our offline data: which magazines we subscribe to, what we buy at the grocery store, and what we put on our credit cards. Is this OK?
Many a social network user’s holy grail is to see social networks aggregated - to quote Jeremiah Owyang,
A movement has been started to allow these relationships to be transplanted from one social network to another. The goal? reduce inefficient adding of relationships, improving the accuracy of the network, and providing users with control and management of their relationship data.
I spent some time several years ago working at Sxip pursuing one aspect of this dream. Kaliya Hamlin of Open ID, the folks who started FOAF, and many others (feel free to help me out by listing in comments) have continued the crusade.
Here’s my question: Is the fight to look at this problem from the user’s perspective a losing battle? When it happens, perhaps it will be the provider’s profit motive that drives it, and the advertisers that benefit. Jeremiah suggests that the benefit to the social network is “increase their number of users”. But isn’t the real benefit “finally make real money by selling user data to the highest bidder to make more targeted ads”?
Can users really retain control of their data, or has the horse already left the barn? Maybe we want to keep our social networks separate after all.
Interested to hear your thoughts.
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